Plastic teeth shake their many little hands with my scalp
Our first meeting they come waving a white flag
Disguising their true purpose:
To find and to kill all hair hugs
Exterminating so many little embraces is painful
Their carnivorous fangs bite into the bunches
Tearing at angles
Something foreign
destroys my natural tangles
They said it was for my own good
To teach me a lesson about being
beautiful
My first word was “Owie”
She oversaw the procedure when I was young
As years passed, I took over the position
I got used to ripping myself apart every morning
People liked it
Straight, long, and damaged
I forgot to cry when it hurt
Did you know that hair-pulling is the number one cause of dementia?
Or that balding is an exponentially increasing phenomenon in young things?
Rapnuzel has a lot of hair
I bet it takes her all day
To get through her curls
They say she is trapped in the castle
I think she is too tired to walk down all those stairs
I was taught to buy things on sale.
When I was 13
Rumpelstiltskin said he would spin my hair
for half off the usual price.
I was famous for a week
It took me two lifetimes to pay the imp’s fee
When I was 27 my best friend had an x-ray
Shaving it all off felt good
Much more efficient than pulling out each individual hair
One at a time
I’d never felt so close to her than those days before she died
I have a daughter now
I’m trying to teach her healthy hair care
I wonder what she will see in trapped princesses and deals with imps
I wonder what her first word will be